After an absence from significant IoT-Core activity, whilst working on a significant phone app (as blogged here) I’m back in the IoT-Core space. Things have changed for the better so here goes. This blog covers my experiences with getting a RPI3 going with the latest Technical Preview build. Tools are now available to simplify setup and there is now a Remote Viewer. As a test UWP app, I have used (after a small modification) the Icons app on Codeplex, Universal Windows 10 SDK App Icons app as blogged in a previous blog. The app was modified because popups (as in MessageBox) are not supported in IoT-Core (Use thereof can cause an app crash in later OS versions). This feature change is covered.

This blog covers the use of the Symbol Enumeration class as the displayed icon of XAML buttons. Data binding of them to ViewBoxes is also covered including in a MenuItem template. This includes implicitly creating a list of Symbols for the menu in a couple of lines of code. AppBars are also covered

Screen Scraping tools have been around for some time. These enable an app to download HTML source and extract specific entities from an HTML page. Given that an HTML table IS structured data it shouldn’t be hard to programmatically extract a table. It could be done with Linq queries to teh page text. This blog uses the HTMLAgilityPack’s HtmlDocument in a Universal Windows app to extract an HTML table directly into a list of a matching class.

Universal Windows SDK Version Picker. When creating a new UWP project, you can now select the version of the Windows SDK to target as well as the minimum OS version on which the apps are to be available.

Debugging C++ Background Task in Universal Windows Apps. You can now debug Background task processes in a Universal Windows app in Visual Studio. You can access this option on the project Properties Debug tab.

PS: Has anyone tried Compact 2013 Platform Builder and App Development with this release. Have they made it through unscathed?

In a previous blog I dicussed discussed in detail deployment of an app to a Windows 10 Phone. One of the options, Sideloading required the winappdeploycmd tool that is installed with the Windows 10 SDK. I suggested that maybe you could just install winappdeploycmd as its .msi installing is a separate entity in the SDK installation files. I now have tested this.

Visual Studio automatically creates a Test Certificate when the project is created. But in moving the code around, especially to and from a repository you might need to create a new one. Also, the default certificate that Visual Studio generates expires one year after the date on which the certificate was created. Before the certificate expires, you must use the App Manifest Designer to either regenerate the certificate or to create a new one. Without this you can’t create an AppX package for app installation. Here’s how to create a Test Certificate.

I purchased some Windows 10 Phones for business use where they are to run a custom UWP business app. Being about $100 they are quite economic but they were locked to local Telco, Optus (Australia). The Telco would give you the unlock key for $90 but I found an online site that could do it for about $20.

The key take home is that the instructions for implementing it as per the Telco and as per the source of the key I used, did not work for me but there is a simple method that worked for me that others had used with AT&T: